Brideshead Revisited

by Evelyn Waugh

“I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.”

Sebastian, idly turning the page of Clive Bell’s Art, read: “ ‘Does anyone feel the same kind of emotion for a butterfly or a flower that he feels for a cathedral or a picture?’ Yes. I do,” that my eyes were opened.

But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that

gray city.

He was entrancing, with that epicene beauty which in extreme youth sings aloud for love and withers at the first cold wind.

I could tell him, too, that to know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.

so that the savage we had tamed was still rampant in him.

I found a box of this paper at the back of a bureau so I must write to you as I am mourning for my lost innocence. It never looked like living. The doctors despaired of it from the start.

That night I began to realize how little I really knew of Sebastian, and to understand why he had always sought to keep me apart from the rest of his life. He was like a friend made on board ship, on the high seas; now we had come to his home port.

On some days life kept pace with the gondola, as we nosed through the side-canals and the boatman uttered his plaintive musical bird-cry of warning; on other days with the speed-boat bouncing over the lagoon in a stream of sun-lit foam; it left a confused memory of fierce sunlight on the sands and cool, marble interiors; of water everywhere, lapping on smooth stone, reflected in a dapple of light on painted ceilings; of a night at the Corombona palace such as Byron might have known,

“It is a kind of love that comes to children

In England it comes when you are almost men; I think I like that. It is better to have that kind of love for another boy than for a girl.

And how has she deserved all this hate? She has done nothing except to be loved by someone who was not grown up.

“When people hate with all that energy, it is something in themselves they are hating.

He was sick at heart somewhere, I did not know how, and I grieved for him, unable to help.

I wondered, as the train carried me farther and farther from Lady Marchmain, whether perhaps there was not on her, too, the same blaze, marking her and hers for destruction by other ways than war. Did she see a sign in the red center of her cozy grate and hear it in the rattle of creeper on the window-pane, this whisper of doom?

And that night, the first time for many weeks, we got deliriously drunk together; I saw him to the gate as all the bells were striking midnight, and reeled back to my rooms under a starry heaven which swam dizzily among the towers, and fell asleep in my clothes as I had not done for a year.

A blow, expected, repeated, falling on a bruise, with no smart or shock of surprise, only a dull and sickening pain and the doubt whether another like it could be borne—that was how it felt, sitting opposite Sebastian at dinner that night,

A door had shut, the low door in the wall I had sought and found in Oxford; open it now and I should find no enchanted garden.

I had left behind me—what? Youth? Adolescence? Romance? The conjuring stuff of these things,

“I have left behind illusion,” I said to myself. “Henceforth I live in a world of three dimensions—with the aid of my five senses.” I have since learned that there is no such world, but then, as the car turned out of sight of the house, I thought it took no finding, but lay all about me at the end of the avenue.

she had only to stroke it with her fingertips and whisper the charmed word, for the earth to open at her feet and belch forth her titanic servant, the fawning monster who would bring her whatever she asked, but bring it, perhaps, in unwelcome shape.

She was a symbol to herself then, lacking the life of both child and woman; victory and defeat were changes of pin and line; she knew nothing of war.

Not for her the cruel, delicate luxury of choice, the indolent, cat-and-mouse pastimes of the hearth-rug. No Penelope she; she must hunt in the forest.

He simply wasn’t all there. He wasn’t a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole.

But God won’t let them go for long, you know.

I had felt the brush take life in my hand that afternoon; I had had my finger in the great, succulent pie of creation. I was a man of the Renaissance that evening—of Browning’s renaissance. I, who had walked the streets of Rome in Genoa velvet and had seen the stars through Galileo’s tube, spurned the friars, with their dusty tomes and their sunken, jealous eyes and their crabbed hair-splitting speech.

But despite this isolation and this long sojourn in a strange world, I remained unchanged, still a small part of myself pretending to be whole.

“I don’t believe you’ve changed at all, Charles.” “No, I’m afraid not.” “D’you want to change?” “It’s the only evidence of life.”

She seemed to say: “Look at me. I have done my share. I am beautiful. It is something quite out of the ordinary, this beauty of mine. I am made for delight. But what do I get out of it? Where is my reward?”

When, before dinner, she went to her cabin to get ready (no one dressed that night) and I came with her, uninvited, unopposed, expected, and behind closed doors took her in my arms and first kissed her, there was no alteration from the mood of the afternoon.

“It’s just that he isn’t a real person at all; he’s just a few faculties of a man highly developed; the rest simply isn’t there.

He can’t see the point of me, but whenever he’s made up his mind there isn’t a point and he’s begun to feel comfortable, he gets a surprise—some man, or even woman, he respects, takes a fancy to me and he suddenly sees that there is a whole world of things we understand and he doesn’t…

“You are standing guard over your sadness.”

“Oh dear,” said Julia, “where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm?”

“Sometimes,” said Julia, “I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there’s no room for the present at all.”

when I was trying to bear his child, torn in pieces by something already dead; putting him away, forgetting him, finding you, the past two years with you, all the future with you, all the future with or without you, war coming, world ending—sin.

a jingle of the nursery that came to her now in the twilight world between sorrow and sleep:

“A few days, a few months.” “No time to be lost.” “A lifetime between the rising of the moon and its setting. Then the dark.”

“perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving-stones along the weary road that others have tramped before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.”